SACRAMENTO – California’s unemployment rate jumped three-tenths of a percentage point to set a modern record of 12.2 percent in August, but there were signs the state might be emerging from recession as the rate of job losses slowed.

The state Employment Development Department said Friday that there were 2.2 million unemployed people in California last month.

Trade, transportation and utilities posted the largest declines, along with manufacturing, financial activities, business services, leisure and other parts of the service sector.

Even as the overall jobless rate grew, the number of jobs lost from July to August was just 12,000, down from about 35,000 in the previous month. From November 2008 until last June, the state lost 65,000 or more jobs each month, said Jerry Nickelsburg, a senior economist with the Anderson Forecast at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In February alone, the state lost more than 110,000 jobs.

“The big story is the continued decline in the rate of job loss in payroll employment,” Nickelsburg said. “That’s much more significant than the slight uptick in the unemployment rate.”

California was one of 42 states to lose jobs last month, when the national jobless rate hit 9.7 percent. The state is tied with Oregon for the fourth-highest unemployment rate nationally, behind Michigan, Nevada and Rhode Island.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said earlier this week that the recession is likely over but warned that the economy will not grow quickly enough to lower the nation’s unemployment rate in the short-term.

The Anderson Forecast projects that California and the rest of the nation will emerge from the recession this quarter, but the recovery in the state will continue to lag the U.S. over the next year.

“We were one of the poster children for excesses in housing, and we’re also the locus of importation of manufactured goods from Asia for all of the U.S. Then you sort of layer on that the fact that our government has to shrink,” Nickelsburg said. “It’s a big reduction in expenditures.”

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said the jobless rate reinforces the importance of addressing California’s economic problems, including its antiquated tax structure and the water shortage in the Central Valley.

“While I am pleased to see fewer jobs lost, my administration will not rest until job growth resumes and employment returns to normal,” he said in a statement.